Tag: family

Outside of my citizenship pursuit, this week has been extraordinarily bad for news. Other family is wounded, with one, very young member missing, a girl of thirteen. She has been taken, yet gone voluntarily, and it is destroying us. The authorities tell us there is no hope.

I bought my father a death certificate search yesterday. It cost twenty-seven dollars. (This is not the strangest thing I’ve ever done, but I believe it to be the most unsettling credit card purchase I’ve ever made, and that’s saying something, as I just sent someone a pewter-cast bat skull tie-pin as a birthday present.) Basically this means I have hired the Department of Vital Statistics to search through the death records of the city of my choice, in the three year period of my choice, to try and find out if my father has died. Course, a few hours after I did that, some very delicate social grape-vine contacts informed me that he’s still alive. So, okay, wasted money, but at least it rescued me from my position of doubt and perplexity – the uncomfortable dilemma: what outcome I was hoping for?

Fun fact: Anyone may order and receive a death certificate for someone who died in British Columbia. Release of death certificates is not limited to immediate family.

Back east, my amazing uncle Francis unearthed all of my ancestral paperwork, like my grandfather’s birth certificate, his marriage license to my grandmother, (which, amusingly, lists her birthplace as only “Russia” and her occupation as “spinster”), and my father’s birth certificate, and e-mailed them to me as high quality scans. They are beautiful artifacts, history manifest. Now, according to the immigration requirements, it’s a matter of either signing an affidavit that states my father is too dangerous to contact or having a family member far, far away request a copy of his current identification. Either way, it’s very likely that this will wrap up much sooner than expected.

Fun Fact: According to my father’s birth certificate, my grandfather was an embalmer.

More bad news has come in. If anyone local to Vancouver has any contact numbers for support groups or counseling for families who have lost members to the Downtown Eastside sex & drug trade, it would be appreciated. Information or resource centers available to parents of underage delinquents would also be relevant. Thanks.

I’ve begun pursuing a potentially dangerous course of action, something I’ve been putting off as long as I possibly could:

I’ve started the steps required to get my Irish citizenship.

My father’s father was born in Cashel. Because of this, according to Irish Naturalization and Immigration Services, I’m eligible for Citizenship Through Descent. Naturally, you might be curious as to why this is a risky proposition, and why I haven’t followed through with it before, especially as I’ve such a bee in my bonnet about getting the heck out of Canada. Well, here’s the caveat: even though my family in Winnipeg already has copies of all the tricky, hard-to-find, turn-of-last-century, grandfather-related paperwork, the application also requires documents that relate to my unstable, schizophrenic, murderous father. Very particular documents, the sort that require permission to access, like his full civil birth certificate and copies of his current identity documents.

When I had set up to move to London a few years ago, my plan was to apply for all the paperwork from the safety of another continent, where there would be no possible way he would go so far as to show up at my door with a gun or a sharpened crowbar. My work visa would cover my UK residency until my citizenship was finalized, freeing me to finally wander the EU as I saw fit, but when that move didn’t happen, stupidly superseded by the failed Heart of the World project, my citizenship application plans were put on the back burner, only to be considered as an utterly last resort.

Given that my 29th birthday has just come and gone, it seems to be well past time I dust those plans off again. Which raises some interesting questions, like “would contacting my father to get permission, as hazardous and a bad idea as that is, break the terms of the restraining order I have against him?” or “because I have a restraining order, and he has a proven history of extreme violence, is it possible that the government would let me circumvent him entirely?”. I really have no idea, nor do I know who to contact to get those answers.

In the meantime, while I call endless office drones, attempting to find out what I need to know, (and to discover who, honestly, I should be calling), the family clan in Winnipeg are my angels, sifting through old boxes, looking for the relevant paperwork to scan and e-mail to me, so I don’t have to apply directly to Ireland in the middle of a postal strike.

This past weekend was exhausting, the sort that feels alright to leave behind. Saturday was eaten up by David’s sister’s wedding, a strange affair out in Abbotsford at a family restaurant, small, informal, slightly terrifying, and Sunday was taken up with Slutwalk, a thousand person protest march against victim shaming that Katie N. helped put together. Oddly, out of the two, even though Slutwalk was four hours of being on my feet, running around and taking pictures, surviving the little wedding took more out of me. Something to do with social shock, maybe, or walmart-culture inspired depression. Either way, it’s not something I would be willing to do again.

There was also a long, miserable walk home from Broadway on Sunday, broken and alone. It ended with John catching me in my room crying, so he went out and brought back two delicious cupcakes from the new place up the street, presenting them to me in a small paper box, “Here’s some men-are-scum cupcakes.” I sniffled and laughed, and said, “Men aren’t scum.” He replied, “Yes they are sweetie. Trust me, I am one. Eat your cupcake. It’ll help make everything better.” And he was right. It did.

(He also, tongue firmly planted in cheek, brought me a voodou doll when he arrived from New Orleans to “help” with my heartbreak. It’s a grassy thing dressed in pink, with a burned plastic doll face and a magic lima bean tied to its waist with some leather. Creepy looking, yes, but with the effect somewhat ruined by the mass produced tag around its neck: FOR ATTRACTION.)

Today I’m processing pictures, doing laundry, and last minute packing for my trip to NY, making certain I have cords for things, trying to remember if I packed any stockings, triple checking that I’ve put aside pants that fit me, shirts for every weather, vitamins, hairpins, toothpaste, moonlight, music, the moose hat, and things with feathers on them. Really I’ve been more or less ready for a couple of days, I could have left yesterday, the only thing left is to find a missing bird skull earring, but there’s something comforting about being extra sure.

Song on repeat, fingers frigid from typing, everything around me perfectly still. We’re talking about dying, about family in the hospital, about relationships that never were, chances that perished almost as quickly as they had become. I think about fire, about how much tragedy stains my heart, how much sorrow clogs my breath. The boyfriend who committed suicide, the woman who was almost my mother, dragged to death, pregnant, under a truck. Family wrapped in white sheets, counting minutes. A different parent, one of many, confused, waiting to die. There was a phone-call. Later, at some unknown time, there will be another, and perhaps the person on the line and I will cry together.

I’m helplessly needless and needless to say I owe you.
Helplessly needless and needless to say I owe you.

Outside is cold, the rain has half frozen, but I expect colder still. Clothed in frost, in the shirt of someone I used to love, winter is crawling through the windows, offering loneliness in place of flowers, memories of years when I still had a future. They play out like beads on a string of days, tallied in small bursts, bright but too long ago. How is it that days are so long, while years are so short? Fractions of lifetime stretched out over bone. Cells replicating. I used to believe that one day would be easier. Soon I will be too old for it. I will be done, the last page written. The book closed. Somewhere out there, past the glass, there is snow.

Well I’d wait ten thousand picks for just one more chance, just one more chance to see your face again.

The people around me do not know how to cure this sorrow. Tender, they insist on holding me or pet my hair, as if rocking silently is enough. Shivering, I require more, to engage, to pull my intelligence out from my pain. Perspective as everything. (Not everything broken can be repaired.) On the east coast is a grandfather, lungs filling with fluid, and a boy near the phone. We write back and forth, filling the void with comforting words, distractions, poetry, and rough jokes. We write back and forth and I do not know if I am helping. I do not know if I am like my friends, heartfelt yet inadequate, offering solace that would comfort me, but not them.

Well I’d pull, teeter away, at the earth with my teeth, the earth with my teeth to touch your face alive.

The piano kicks in, quiet, insistent, with a sound like birds. I am collapsing, fracturing, splintering, shivering into pieces. If someone were to touch me, I would explode, shrapnel embedded in every wall, with a sound like a wounded animal, terrified and very, very young.

You lie helplessly still as your face falls apart.
You lie helplessly still as your face falls apart.

My stress betrays me. Inside of my belly, chemicals misfire, hormones fail. I do not release an egg. “Progesterone secretion is prolonged because estrogen levels are low”. My womb is lost, continues singing for fertility, even with the map misplaced. The walls thicken, then slough. Bleeding seven days, eight, now thirty. A flood. I grow pale. The red spills like an endless creek, enough to fill a pail. I am a tributary, coloured scarlet. Chunks of flesh escape me as big as the palm of my hand. My breath vanishes, the world glitters, and suddenly exhaustion, fatigue. It is too much effort to ask my heart to beat. I cannot move. My body is a heavy as lead, my veins filled with gold.

With wax and wires and hair from the back of your head.
With wax and wires and hair from the back of your head.

With my blood, so sleep. I am awake in the dark, endlessly so. My breath solidifies, but my dreams do not. Instead I write, I reply, my back-log of messages attacked, finally, until dawn, the sun a smudge of gray the same tenor as a cough. To a former lover, lost for too long, I write, “Your silver hair makes me think of feathers, of flight, and the purity of light seen through the fractures of a crystal. Perhaps you are, in fact, slowly turning into a dove, one the colour of lightning, a tongue like glass and a brain ripe with electricity.” Our love was a wonderful thing, poetry balanced on edge, the quirky, deprived, and mad meeting together as one. Maybe somewhere is a world where it worked out.

Well, I can make your face brand new.
Well, I can make your face brand new.

We stay up late, my current love and I, an ordinary history of affection warped by misunderstandings, his lack of experience, the way he abandoned us the first time we fought. Where do we go from here? Defining what is wrong is only a first step, almost a year late, too late, almost a year since it all began. My eyes are glued shut with salt, hot and sad. His arm bleeds where it scraped against the side of the bed. My role has been counselor, not partner. Tearing words from his tongue has been almost impossible, the squeezing of blood from a stone. Together we have been teaching him responsibility, and though he is quick, he resists.

La da la da la da da da da da da da da da da

Dawn painting the top of the mountains, the world’s orbit sliding day into place. The urge to shift from bed, to draw on the window, withers against the memory of warmth, of shifting discussions, the lace of conversation drifting over my eyes like something imagined from a far away land.

You are warm, you are warm

There are only four ways for a relationship to end; stuck together or split apart, drowned with misery or flavoured with subtle joy. Duality doubled, basics, building blocks, the future laid out as cabled strings that tie lives together. Abandonment, paperwork, making tomorrow always better than today. I fought for us until he apologized, truth the most harrowing weapon of all, and then my heart burst, as if there was nothing left inside the pain but exhaustion, terrible, cruel, but free. Even so, we are lucky. Now, no matter how it turns out, as a couple or merely friends, we will find peace. We’ll love each other until death do us part.

Chanukkah lights are not for the “lighting of the house within”, but rather for the “illumination of the house without”, so it’s traditional to put them in a window where they can be easily seen. This one is in my bedroom window, in a silver candlestick Silva gave me for my twenty-first birthday.

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Welcome! I have been blogging since 2003. It could be argued that I've gotten better at it, but perhaps I just haven't gotten any worse. Expect a mixture of wonder, pointlessness, isolation, and community.